hospitals

Coding errors are common--and costly. There were $2.91B in OIG investigative recoveries for FY18 alone. Hospitals need to catch coding errors prior to billing, or risk heavy fines, legal issues and even a damaged reputation. What if you could catch coding errors prior to billing? PwC SMART increases the efficiency and effectiveness of inpatient and outpatient coding quality evaluation process, and enables a mechanism for quality and compliance review. See how SMART led to $1.8M in net reimbursement impact for a network of independent healthcare providers in New Jersey, and learn more about the inpatient and outpatient solutions.

Video collaboration opens up opportunities for greater interaction and innovation, regardless of industry. Everyone benefits. For example, in healthcare, video is dramatically changing the way institutions interact with customers and professionals. In recent years, a number of hospitals across the United States have been subscribing to video and voice call centers that enable them to share language interpretation services, psychiatric care services and other developing capabilities. In the process, video collaboration is affecting business outcomes, changing business processes and helping healthcare facilities achieve scale, cost and efficiency not seen before.

"Transforming the capabilities of Norway’s largest hospital with Avaya VENA Fabric Connect Oslo University Hospital needed a scalable, smart healthcare network to bring together three hospitals and absorb future growth, new acquisitions and third-party services. Read this case study for the details on how they accomplished their goals, and much more >"

Harsh environments for PCs are not confined to factory floors and constructions sites today. They also include hospitals, trucks, and even some classroom settings, among others. A new study from IDG Research and related two-page paper detail just what environmental threats worry buyers the most, and therefore what laptop purchasing criteria rank the highest. Tying together strong computing capability with a highly productive operating system in the right rugged notebook solution is possible. Download this two-page paper to learn the most important factors driving needs for refreshed rugged systems.

Today’s changing healthcare landscape demands more from the finance department than ever before. No longer a sideshow in the healthcare delivery equation, finance now plays a starring role as hospitals and healthcare providers of all kinds face the
challenge of implementing the reforms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010.

Many hospital Chief Marketing Officers continue to debate whether their institution should transform their traditional marketing campaigns and embrace digital marketing. If you are in doubt as to whether digital marketing is important to your success and the success of your hospital, look at the countless articles, white papers, and blogs that have been published over the past several years that talk to the use of the internet and web-based services by patients and consumers. Here are a few of the latest examples from Pew Research Center’s Health Fact Sheet (

Changing healthcare market forces, such as value-based care models, consolidation, and payer mix erosion, have propagated declining margins and fueled hyper-competition among healthcare organizations vying for market share. In this new world, determining effective patient engagement strategies has become paramount for hospitals and health systems as they strive to acquire, retain, and re-activate patients, and, ultimately, drive revenue. Now, more than ever, it is critical that healthcare organizations create and maintain positive, lasting relationships with their patients, both current and prospective, working to attract them into their network and keep them there.

t’s stunning really, that something as basic as communication among your care team members is such a significant factor in your success as a health delivery organization. And yet, it’s proven every day in
hospitals and other patient care settings throughout the nation. Every one of these either affects or reflects your ability to complete tasks effectively.
At right is a list of metrics that are affected by communications among clinical staff.

Hospitals and other care organizations are turning to clinical communication & collaboration solutions—often referred to as
CC&C systems—as a way to improve care-team coordination and
to expedite care delivery. But there’s an unexpected challenge
with this journey.
These clinical communication solutions are changing so rapidly, it’s not easy for IT decision-makers to be confident with their vendor selection. You want to pick the best system for your organization, but there are so many factors to consider. And the factors keep changing. At any moment, you don’t know what you don’t know.
This Technical Buyer’s Guide is for you if:
• You’re an IT professional in a healthcare organization that provides direct patient care.
• Your organization is thinking of purchasing a new system to support clinical communications among
your clinical and administrative staff.
• You’re looking for technical details that will help you choose the best communication solution for your
organization.

U.S. hospitals waste more than $12 billion annually as a result of inefficient clinical communication. This recent study also found that healthcare communication errors resulted in nearly 2,000 deaths over a five-year period. Streamlined clinical communication can dramatically change these statistics. Download this ebook to learn more.

Located in central Ontario approximately 100 km (60 miles) north of Toronto, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) provides highly responsive healthcare to more than 450,000 residents across a large geographical area. RVH’s team of more than 380 physicians, 2,500 staff members, and 850 volunteers delivers exceptional care and specialty services including cancer care, stroke services, orthopedics, intensive care, mental health services, and interventional radiology. In addition to the 319-bed acute care facility in Barrie, RVH also provides the MEDITECH electronic health records (EHR) platform for several other hospitals in Midland, Orangeville, and Collingwood.

Put simply, the aim of reporting is to translate or convert data into information. Reporting done well often prompts end-users to raise questions about the business. Analytics fills in the gap, answering the questions raised by reporting, thereby transforming data into insights. Read more to find out how analytics can go beyond reporting to provide actionable recommendations to improve business performance.

Providing employer group customers an easy-to-use analytical platform is one of the key ways health plans can demonstrate value and improve retention. Read to find out more about how Employer Reporting can help health plans and their customers.

The Charlotte Hungerford Hospital’s pioneering success shows that HIEs can deliver tremendous value by facilitating more coordinated care with community hospitals, small physician practices, and often-overlooked members of the healthcare community.

In most use cases involving flash storage deployments, the business environment changes, driving a need for higher-performance storage. However, the case of Epic Systems Corporation software is the opposite—the storage requirements haven’t changed recently, but the options for addressing them have.
Epic, a privately-held company founded in 1979 and based in Verona,Wisconsin, makes applications for medical groups, hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Epic software typically exhibits high frequency,random storage accesses with stringent latency requirements. IBM has been working with Epic to develop host-side and storage-side solutions to meet these requirements. Extensive testing has demonstrated that the combination of IBM® POWER8™ servers and IBM FlashSystem™ storage more than meets the performance levels Epic recommends for the backend storage supporting its software implementations—at a cost point multiple times lower than other storage alternatives.

Data driven tools and analytics can uncover a wealth of new savings opportunities for surgery centers and surgical hospitals. And you usually don’t have to search far to uncover the savings. You can immediately tap into one source of data to find these opportunities. Every Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management System offers a set of standard reports. Stored inside are at least five ways to save. Download this whitepaper to learn about these five opportunities

Previous best practices for cleaning healthcare facilities centered on sanitizing frequently touched objects, such as bed rails or call buttons, because these objects were believed to be major sources of contagion. However, this new study finds that floors are the largest potential source of pathogens after reviewing five participating Cleveland-area hospitals.
Specifically, the following findings are highlighted in the study:
• Patient room floors in five hospitals were found to be contaminated with healthcare-associated pathogens.
• High-touch objects often came to be in direct contact with the floor.
• Touching objects on the floor frequently resulted in transfer of pathogens to hands.
• Floors in hospital rooms are overlooked as a source for pathogen dissemination, with potentially dangerous results.

It’s no secret—healthcare is transforming. The transition to value-based care is well underway; healthcare players are feeling the impact and each has a role to play, including you! Moving to a value-driven model demands agility from every person, process and technology. These changes are generating more data than ever, there is a lot of data, in fact IDC Global Health Insights predicted that over the next 10 years, the amount of digital healthcare data created annually will grow 44 fold. Organizations that lead the pack and succeed will be those where clinicians, business leaders and patients are empowered with access to clean, safe and connected data. Learn more about your role in putting information to work…

Hear how leading hospitals are using the Digital Clinical Workspace as a platform for innovation to improve the patient and provider experience, and enable the right device at the right time for the right task. The session will cover new key technologies to help protect patient data and cover the recent announcement of Target Platform for Epic 2015.

HIMSS Analytics, in partnership with Akamai, recently conducted a survey of U.S. hospitals to understand the current state of web security in healthcare as well as what plans are in place to improve preparedness. The results raise some concerns that despite greater consciousness of the increased risk to healthcare data security, many hospitals are still vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks. Read this survey to learn about critical weaknesses in hospital web security.

In this case study, large health systems implement IBM Watson Health to surface improvement opportunities. Using this tool, they were able to cut costs, reduce patients’ length of stay, acquire actionable data, address number of readmissions and improve management of COPD and sepsis.

This one-page interview describes the importance of providing clinicians with access to evidence-based information and discusses how artificial intelligence can help deliver that information quickly at the point-of-care.

For Japan’s largest medical equipment wholesaler, Mutoh, ensuring its 300,000 products reach hospitals, clinics and health-centres on time is an imperative. Someone’s life depends on it.
Without IT that wouldn’t be possible. But Mutoh’s IT infrastructure was unable to keep pace with the demands of the business. Every time an order came in, Mutoh had to pull data from different systems across multiple servers which was time-consuming.
It needed an IT infrastructure that was fast, high-performing, reliable, stable, and flexible.
Mutoh turned to Lenovo’s hyperconverged infrastructure that helped the company achieve:
• The ability to seamlessly extract data from different systems across multiple physical servers helped Mutoh respond to customer orders as quickly as possible, thereby saving lives
• A modular hyperconverged solution allowed Mutoh to invest on a need basis, improving ROI and addressing spikes in customer demand

For Japan’s largest medical equipment wholesaler, Mutoh, ensuring its 300,000 products reach hospitals, clinics and health-centres on time is an imperative. Someone’s life depends on it.
Without IT that wouldn’t be possible. But Mutoh’s IT infrastructure was unable to keep pace with the demands of the business. Every time an order came in, Mutoh had to pull data from different systems across multiple servers which was time-consuming.
It needed an IT infrastructure that was fast, high-performing, reliable, stable, and flexible.
Mutoh turned to Lenovo’s hyperconverged infrastructure that helped the company achieve:
• The ability to seamlessly extract data from different systems across multiple physical servers helped Mutoh respond to customer orders as quickly as possible, thereby saving lives
• A modular hyperconverged solution allowed Mutoh to invest on a need basis, improving ROI and addressing spikes in customer demand